Leonard Pitts

We don’t even know the woman’s name yet. In fact, we don’t know much of anything about her except that she is Black. That’s not a lot, but it’s more than enough for some people. Ever since last week, when Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer announced... Read More

These days, we have Denzel Washington. We have Viola Davis, Kevin Hart and Jamie Foxx. We have Octavia Spencer, Regina King and Samuel L. Jackson. We have Idris Elba, Lupita Nyong’o, Taraji P. Henson, Michael B. Jordan, Mahershala Ali, Tiffany Haddish and Will Smith. We have,... Read More

Abraham could have asked for anything. The Make-A-Wish folks stood ready to make a dream come true for the 13-year-old boy, who has aplastic anemia, a life-threatening blood disorder. But Adeola “Abraham” Olagbegi didn’t ask for a PS5 or a day with LeBron James. No, he... Read More

Why would they do this? That question rises inevitably from a new wave of so-called flash-mob robberies, thieves by the dozens invading retail stores to simply take what they want. It’s happened in California, Illinois, Minnesota and Maryland. Retailers ranging from Nordstrom to 7-Eleven have been... Read More

Isabella Tichenor killed herself a few days ago. She was 10 years old. Her mother, Brittany Tichenor-Cox, said last week that her daughter — she called her “Izzy” — had been the target of ongoing racist abuse from classmates at her school in North Salt Lake,... Read More

As police misbehavior goes, it was a small thing. No one was killed, or shot, or even arrested. But in a sense, that gives it all the more impact. Shorn of the distracting emotionalism of bloodshed or false arrest, last week’s video recording of an incident... Read More

Condoleezza Rice wants to move on. She concedes that what happened on Jan. 6 was “wrong.” It was, she told the hosts of “The View” last week, an “assault on law and order, and an assault on our democratic processes.” And Rice, a former national security... Read More

They told them they had bad blood. What they actually had was syphilis, but the U.S. Public Health Service never shared that diagnosis with the almost 400 African American men, most of them poor and under-educated sharecroppers, they recruited for a secret study at Tuskegee Institute... Read More

“Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.” — Martin Luther King Dr. King didn’t know the half of it. Those words, after all, are from 1963. Back then, the idea of U.S. citizens and lawmakers attacking their own democracy would... Read More